The director of the CIA just went off on Donald Trump. It was a long time coming.

FBI Director James B. Comey, left, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and CIA Director John O. Brennan testify before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on Jan. 10. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

President-elect Donald Trump has long flirted with an adversarial relationship with our country's intelligence community. And now he apparently has gone too far for at least one of its leaders.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published Monday night, CIA Director John O. Brennan had finally had it. Brennan said Trump crossed “the line” by invoking Nazi Germany while talking about the intelligence community having, in Trump's words, “allowed” a dossier full of unconfirmed and salacious allegations about him to leak into the public domain.

Here's Trump's tweet:

Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to "leak" into the public. One last shot at me.Are we living in Nazi Germany?

Brennan didn't hold back, saying Trump has a right to challenge the intelligence community — but not in this manner.

“It’s when there are allegations made about leaking or about dishonesty or a lack of integrity, that’s where I think the line is crossed,” Brennan said.

He added: “Tell the families of those 117 CIA officers who are forever memorialized on our wall of honor that their loved ones who gave their lives were akin to Nazis. Tell the CIA officers who are serving in harm’s way right now and their families who are worried about them that they are akin to Nazi Germany. I found that to be very repugnant, and I will forever stand up for the integrity and patriotism of my officers who have done much over the years to sacrifice for their fellow citizens.”

That's pretty strong.

Brennan will not continue on as CIA director in the soon-to-be-installed Trump administration — that's Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) -- so his decision to lash out at Trump isn't all that significant going forward. But it's worth acknowledging just how stern a rebuke the CIA director delivered to Trump just days before he takes the oath of office.

Speaking Jan. 11, Donald Trump slammed the release of an unsubstantiated intelligence report as "something that Nazi Germany would have done" and called Buzzfeed, the news organization that published it, a "failing pile of garbage." (The Washington Post)

And were this not Trump — and had there not been a kind of slow boil of the president-elect's controversial statements about the intelligence community — this is the kind of thing that would register as major news. In a way, we've become desensitized to it.

He has suggested at multiple points that the intelligence community may have directly leaked the dossier, even as it is not an intelligence document and was seen by many journalists and lawmakers in Washington before BuzzFeed published it. He said last week that it was leaked by “maybe the intelligence agencies, which would be a tremendous blot on their record if they in fact did that.” Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. pushed back, clarifying that “this document is not a U.S. Intelligence Community product and that I do not believe the leaks came from within the [intelligence community].”

Trump has tempered these comments by occasionally inserting some praise of the intelligence community, and he has left enough wiggle room in the things he has said so that it doesn't seem as though he's directly accusing them of working against him — only suggesting as much.

But the totality of it is clear. And Brennan had enough — as others who haven't spoken out certainly have as well. It'll be fascinating to see what happens once Trump's own people are running the intelligence community and leakers say something Trump doesn't like.

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Here’s what President-elect Donald Trump has been doing since the election

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He has been holding interviews and meetings as he prepares to enter the White House.

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He has been holding interviews and meetings as he prepares to enter the White House.